1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an improved data processing system. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a method and system to share existing user and group definitions in a registry between heterogeneous application servers and allowing heterogeneous applications to access the same user and group definitions amongst the heterogeneous application servers.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet, also referred to as an “internetwork”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from a protocol of the sending network to a protocol used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols.
The Internet has become a cultural fixture as a source of both information and entertainment. Many businesses are creating Internet sites as an integral part of their marketing efforts, informing consumers of the products or services offered by the business or providing other information seeking to engender brand loyalty. Many federal, state, and local government agencies are also employing Internet sites for informational purposes, particularly agencies which must interact with virtually all segments of society such as the Internal Revenue Service and secretaries of state. Providing informational guides and/or searchable databases of online public records may reduce operating costs. Further, the Internet is becoming increasingly popular as a medium for commercial transactions.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, also called simply “the Web”. Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In the Web environment, servers and clients effect data transaction using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.). The information in various data files is formatted for presentation to a user by a standard page description language, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to basic presentation formatting, HTML allows developers to specify “links” to other Web resources identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is a special syntax identifier defining a communications path to specific information. Each logical block of information accessible to a client, called a “page” or a “Web page”, is identified by a URL. The URL provides a universal, consistent method for finding and accessing this information, not necessarily for the user, but mostly for the user's Web “browser”. A browser is a program capable of submitting a request for information identified by an identifier, such as, for example, a URL. A user may enter a domain name through a graphical user interface (GUI) for the browser to access a source of content. The domain name is automatically converted to the Internet Protocol (IP) address by a domain name system (DNS), which is a service that translates the symbolic name entered by the user into an IP address by looking up the domain name in a database.
The Internet also is widely used to transfer applications to users using browsers. With respect to commerce on the Web, individual consumers and business use the Web to purchase various goods and services. In offering goods and services, some companies offer goods and services solely on the Web while others use the Web to extend their reach.
Some Internet-based security systems provide an authorization management solution for corporations to enforce end-to-end protection on web based resources. With end-to-end protection, each user's access to individual web resources can be controlled by a policy or an Access Control List (ACL) attached to those resources independently. These prior art systems enable a user to create a single-sign-on to heterogeneous backend servers, such as, for example, IBM HTTP server and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), and access different web resources based on an individual user's privilege. On the other hand, other systems, such as, for example, a Domino database system provides a distributed client/server database application that enables users to organize, process, track and share information. With later enhancements, a Domino database server also provides an hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) server, a lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) server and a Java development environment, these systems have become a powerful and flexible application which advances web-based collaboration throughout a customer's organization.
However, these prior art systems do not provide an integration mechanism between the two systems. While these systems are powerful in their own right, a means of integrating the two systems so that these systems share user and group registry information is desirable. In particular, by integrating these two separate systems, not only would this allow users to obtain features of each system, but would also allow users to benefit from features of both systems simultaneously that enables users to organize, process, track, and share information. Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a method and system for sharing user and group registry information between heterogeneous servers by integrating the heterogeneous servers so that each server can access the other server's registry information.